No, Microsoft would love nothing more than to bundle as many MICROSOFT utilities as they could. Back in the day they would practically put a hit out on any PC vendor who was caught bundling Netscape. If the DOJ hadn't intervened we wouldn't have Dells and Thinkpads with Linux preinstalled. Hell, I wouldn't have been shocked if they had tried to play hardball in someway with Intel helping out Apple. Maybe a little function that checks the CPU vendor (not unlike their "compatibility check" for the windows 3.1 beta) and randomly crashes the machine, but not before showing a blue screen that says, "Your CPU sucks, buy an AMD".
I would like to be able to 'tag' dvds in my queue. If it then let me filter by tags, or stagger the queue by tags, I'd be happy. I agree that the current profiles feature is a weird hack for the way I use it. Tags would be much more useful. The people who like to keep separate recommendations would be screwed though. At least it tells you why something was recommended.
Half the point of Netflix and the queue system is that you can forget about it. You don't have to remember to stop by the video store, ideally you don't have to remember to reorganize your queue.
My wife and I use it to keep movies and TV shows separate. Before we found the profiles option we had to constantly fiddle with the queue to make sure that we didn't end up with three movies at once, especially during weeks when we were too busy to sit down and watch a full movie. So, we liked to keep episodic things around for those times. Now we'll have to make sure that things are carefully interleaved and when we want something to be at the top we'll have to reorganize because it will screw up the order.
For us, this is just one more reason to drop Netflix. They already pissed us off with the windows only Watch it now feature that I assume our membership fee subsidized. They've gone from being a company that I was loyal to (to the point of not accepting a free month of service from them when they settled a class action lawsuit a couple years ago) to a company that I view with suspicion.
I've finished many and left many at the very end. I never finished 2 (IV in Japan) or 5. I stopped playing both at the end because I was done. I was getting ready to go fight the last bad guy and I just couldn't bring myself to care enough to grind my way through some horribly long dungeon, fight the "last bad guy", then have him change forms and fight him again. I hate this convention in RPGs where the final bad dude has to be at the end of a dungeon and has to change forms. Games rarely have good enough plots that I care enough to see them through. I play the games for the interesting worlds, not for the fight system.
I have also dropped many games because I got tired of fighting random monsters. Some games let you avoid this but few are setup in a way that you can level enough just based on the required fights, so eventually you have to pay your dues and grind.
to be fair, people don't tend to keep incriminating evidence on their phones or seeing eye dogs. Cell phones maybe, but not land lines. I think a thorough search of the dog would be in order though.
Pure free-market economics assume that the players are making rational informed decisions. In software acquisition, that assumption fails often.
Hmm, that might be the dumbest thing anybody has ever based a theory on. I'm talking worse than Liebnitz and the monads. Incidentally, that could make a good name for a band. Perhaps a German industrial band.
My main complaint with Netflix has been quality. I like that shows never seem to studder, but often times my eyes get tired of the blurry video. I hope they plan to add the option to cache more of the movie on this box because there is no way I'm gonna pay $100 for this thing if I'm stuck with blurry video, only now on a larger screen.
The price point is good but I see no compelling reason to buy it unless it offeres more features. They should've added some AppleTV like abilities. Otherwise I'll just plug my laptop into my TV like I do now. I don't need to spend $100 for that.
Really, it is in their best interests to get as many people on this as possible as it will lessen the load on their shipping centers. Right no it just doesn't offer very much. As nice as it sounds to be able to watch Saved By The Bell season 1 on my TV without hooking up my laptop, I'll have to pass for now. Maybe it'll be more exciting when Verizon finally extends FiOs to my area.
Actually a game for the Dreamcast called Space Channel 5 already gave DDR a plot. There are aliens that have taken over and you have to dance and shoot, following the moves shown to you in order to defeat them. The game was just weird enough to be a lot of fun. The concept is so far out there that you can't help but accept it completely. Plus, the visual design of the game is very cool in a retro 1960s view of space travel kinda way.
As a former union worker I can tell you that it was not that difficult to get a union job and pay the dues. Granted, I worked in a grocery workers union, so maybe manufacturing is different. I do know that entertainment is different (they have huge dues to pay). When I got my job (which payed way more than other comparable jobs) I had to pay like $30 a month to join the union. That got me an advocate if they tried to fire me and access to the free health care negotiated by the union. I also got considerably more money than people working at Walmart. But, I wasn't excluded, there were no hoops to jump through except signing that card.
I think part of the reason for the guild is that they don't want things to degenerate into a situation like the video game industry. With the guilds you have specific contractual obligations that are uniform. Yeah, Julia Roberts gets more, but the little guys still get an OK deal on paper (of course no movie ever makes a profit so nobody gets their royalties:). Or at least this is my understanding of the situation. I think the idea is to keep it from being a purely business transaction, especially at the lower end, where people might be undercutting each other to get a chance. That could eventually ruin the entire pay structure.
Some mainstream films are quite good (Godfather 2 for instance). Still, even the crappiest movies are art in a way (if only in the Thomas Kindkade kinda way). My main point is that movies respect to a degree the people who make them happen. I don't see that happening as much with games (which has a lot to do with the relatively short time they've been around). I think that once the platforms stabilize a bit more (and the cost comes down) we'll start to see this happen.
Game companies are going to have to start treating their talent more like the creative individuals that they are and less like assembly line workers who are making toys. Look at all the crap EA puts their employees through. In the end nobody even knows anything about who made the game happen, it's just EA.
I agree about this GTA guy though, the deal is done and nobody should have to pay him more now. But I think he makes a valid point in general. He probably had to take the deal offered because that is how the industry is right now. You try to negotiate and say goodbye to your job. I think that needs to change, not just for voice actors (though if the pay was better maybe the voice actors in games wouldn't suck so much; then again, we'd also need to see better writers), but also for the programmers, writers and designers.
I think they'd like to be considered art, which is easier to defend against accusations of exploitation and harming the youngins. I think the game industry would do well to embrace the idea of video games as a creative pursuit. It would be easier to make indroads into the mainstream as well.
I've gotten the impression that some consider it an art, but perhaps that is just the audience wishing for it to be more accepted by the mainstream. Still, it would be easier to defend GTA for instance if you could convincingly make a comparison between it and a film like Scarface or a show like The Wire. If they start to take themselves seriously, as a creative product, then I think they'd have an easier time convincing people that things like GTA are not marketed at kids. Right now the majority of people see video games as toys.
Video games are starting to sell like movies. Just look at Final Fantasy. How many times is Square going to trot out the old games? Now, there weren't voice actors in those games, but it does show that older titles do have value. Lunar, originally for the SegaCD was later re-released on the Saturn, and later still on the PS1. That game had lots of voice acting. I wonder who got the money for those releases?
If the video game industry wants to be taken more seriously, they should start taking their product more seriously. That means respecting the talent that actually creates the games. Programmers shoulld get paid like writers. They need to have a guild. The head of the team should probably be considered the director or producer. As actors become more and more integral to the success of a game,they should be paid like any other actor. Games will never be "art" until the people who make them start considering them to be art.
How much of that software is open enough or written by benevolent enough people to be translated into all the languages that OLPC needs? Is "100 Shareware Memory improvement games funpack Volume II" available in Mandarin? Ethiopian?
Pretty soon, once you start paying all the fees, you're looking at a $900 laptop. There is Open Source software for windows, but a lot of that is stuff that comes from Linux.
Now, maybe with this XP deal Microsoft is willing to take on the translation task for more than just the core OS. That would be cool. I still think Sugar is useful as an educational tool.
Sugar has some issues, mostly with applications. Too many of them are half finished. Then again, what are they going to do on XP? Play Solitaire and write notes in Wordpad? Most of the issues you listed were not with Sugar itself, but with the applications. You're right that Terminal should be hidden (new versions of the OS allow deployments to choose their own bundles of activities). Yes, there should be more reference materials included. There is an app that is being worked on that bundles portions of Wikipedia for offline access. That sort of stuff needs to be localized though.
As far as the touchpad goes, it does need some work. There has been a lot of work on drivers lately (forcing re-calibration more often) that should clear up some of those problems. Again though, that isn't really Sugar's fault. That is a driver problem which is the fault of either the kernel or X11.
The issue with controls being on the edge of the screen is something I've noticed. You can turn off the automatic frame thingy though (and just use the frame button to activate it). This should be the default.
There are some good games available. Tetris and SimCity are both fun. One is even sorta educational.
Some of the icons are bad, same with Windows, same with MacOSX. Why for instance is the icon for Photoshop CS a quill on a blank white square? Or my new favorite is the icons for page down and page up in Publisher 2007's print preview. You can just barely tell that there are arrows on those icons, if you look really closely.
I think it has some potential; it's certainly not perfect yet. I like the journal (though I don't like how often entries get duplicated, and activities should ask you to name them when you hit the keep button to save). All in all though, it wasn't that hard to get used to, and after having installed some non-sugar apps on it, I can see why they shied away from the traditional GUIs. I would say that their fear of overlapping windows is a bit intense, especially in Browse where it actually renders many pages unusable if they require a usernam/password prompt in a dialog(perhaps having dialogs that work like ones in MacOS X, where they slide out of the titlebar would work).
Also, I believe Apple offered MacOS X for free but they were turned down.
Except in this case you are in a member's only mall. If you become a member fraudulently, then how is that different than trespassing? When you join a website you aren't just wandering into a public place. I think the fact that there is a form that you fill out to become a member makes it different. It's more like being a Costco member.
MySpace doesn't charge for their service. They setup a gate and make the reasonable request that you identify yourself. You lie about who you are and then enter. While you are there you do all sorts of stuff that is against the rules and harmfull to MySpace's business. That certainly sounds like trespassing to me. She entered the MySpace servers without permission, or at least gained permission fraudulently. She did it willfully. She did it intending to do harm.
I guess what makes this seem different to me is that she gained access through fraudulent means. If she had signed up for an account with her own information, then violated the terms of service, she should be asked to leave. However, she instead lied to gain access. I don't know exactly how the law works in this instance, but that feels like a sort of trespassing.
Also, MySpace is not something that you are simply bringing into your home. Like Slashdot, when you post, you are sending it to somebody else's server. You in a sense "go out" to the server.
So, my agrument is that she trespassed, then harmed MySpace by abusing other members, thus harming MySpace's ability to utilize their property (nobody is going to advertise on MySpace if nobody wants to use it due to rampant abuse). So, I don't think the felony charge is a good thing (it does go way too far), but I see no reason that there shouldn't be a civil charge, with MySpace suing the lady. Access to MySpace is only granted through the terms of service. Any other access is trespassing.
It took a bit to get used to but I kinda like Sugar now. My only problem is the speed. That is at least partially because of all the security they put into it. Otherwise, Sugar is fine by me and works well with the small screen. I often run Opera and I really dislike using the menus and such in Opera. Too bad the native Browse app is crippled.
Still, I don't get all the Sugar hatred. I for one welcome our new sugary overlords.
I agree for the most part. My only problem is when people compare online services to the physical world. There is no "public" space online. MySpace is the property of News Corp. It isn't even government owned. When you're on MySpace, the rules should be different. Now, if you're on some web forum that intentionally has no rules, then things are different.
There should be limits on what can be inluded in a term of service, but they should be enforcable, just as private property laws are enforcable. I know that is going to be an unpopular statement here, but why should the Internet be different? Now, this law may be bad, but it doesn't mean that online services shouldn't be allowed to control what constitutes acceptible use of their service. When somebody violates those terms, to the detriment of the service, there should be consequences. Probably not criminal, but certainly civil.
I'm not sure I like this interpretation, but I do think that there should be a reasonable set of enforcable terms of service. I don't think it should be a criminal act though.
My impression of what she did is this. She violated the very reasonable term of service requiring that she identify herself truthfully. She then used this fraudulently created account to harass a minor. Now, that in itself does not appear to be a crime. However,this act which was against the terms of service of MySpace touched a nerve (especially for MySpace who is always in news stories about online predators). So, by posting information about this minor with her fradulent account, she has tarnished the good (I know, that part is a stretch) name of MySpace. At the very least I think MySpace should be able to take her to court.
Now, for this to not be horrible, I think somebody needs to determine what is an acceptible term of service. As much as I enjoyed the free-wheeling days of the anonymous internet, I do think that companies providing services have a right to protect that service.
These machines are neat, but holy shit they're expensive! Why is there such a leap in price when you go from a PDA that costs a few hundred bucks to one of these things that costs between $1000 and $2100 (when not on sale)? This is actually one of the most expensive portable Macs. I think I'd rather bolt a keyboard onto an iPod Touch.
So, how does one find out what type of panel their computer uses? I tried searching online but Dell doesn't seem to want to list the specs on my Vostro laptop. Does anybody know of a way to find this information out so that I can make a more informed decision next time I purchase a screen?
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No, Microsoft would love nothing more than to bundle as many MICROSOFT utilities as they could. Back in the day they would practically put a hit out on any PC vendor who was caught bundling Netscape. If the DOJ hadn't intervened we wouldn't have Dells and Thinkpads with Linux preinstalled. Hell, I wouldn't have been shocked if they had tried to play hardball in someway with Intel helping out Apple. Maybe a little function that checks the CPU vendor (not unlike their "compatibility check" for the windows 3.1 beta) and randomly crashes the machine, but not before showing a blue screen that says, "Your CPU sucks, buy an AMD".
I would like to be able to 'tag' dvds in my queue. If it then let me filter by tags, or stagger the queue by tags, I'd be happy. I agree that the current profiles feature is a weird hack for the way I use it. Tags would be much more useful. The people who like to keep separate recommendations would be screwed though. At least it tells you why something was recommended.
If you're too busy to stop by the video store, you're probably too busy to even watch movies.
Half the point of Netflix and the queue system is that you can forget about it. You don't have to remember to stop by the video store, ideally you don't have to remember to reorganize your queue.
My wife and I use it to keep movies and TV shows separate. Before we found the profiles option we had to constantly fiddle with the queue to make sure that we didn't end up with three movies at once, especially during weeks when we were too busy to sit down and watch a full movie. So, we liked to keep episodic things around for those times. Now we'll have to make sure that things are carefully interleaved and when we want something to be at the top we'll have to reorganize because it will screw up the order.
For us, this is just one more reason to drop Netflix. They already pissed us off with the windows only Watch it now feature that I assume our membership fee subsidized. They've gone from being a company that I was loyal to (to the point of not accepting a free month of service from them when they settled a class action lawsuit a couple years ago) to a company that I view with suspicion.
I've finished many and left many at the very end. I never finished 2 (IV in Japan) or 5. I stopped playing both at the end because I was done. I was getting ready to go fight the last bad guy and I just couldn't bring myself to care enough to grind my way through some horribly long dungeon, fight the "last bad guy", then have him change forms and fight him again. I hate this convention in RPGs where the final bad dude has to be at the end of a dungeon and has to change forms. Games rarely have good enough plots that I care enough to see them through. I play the games for the interesting worlds, not for the fight system.
I have also dropped many games because I got tired of fighting random monsters. Some games let you avoid this but few are setup in a way that you can level enough just based on the required fights, so eventually you have to pay your dues and grind.
to be fair, people don't tend to keep incriminating evidence on their phones or seeing eye dogs. Cell phones maybe, but not land lines. I think a thorough search of the dog would be in order though.
Pure free-market economics assume that the players are making rational informed decisions. In software acquisition, that assumption fails often.
Hmm, that might be the dumbest thing anybody has ever based a theory on. I'm talking worse than Liebnitz and the monads. Incidentally, that could make a good name for a band. Perhaps a German industrial band.
Not a monopoly, but we were recently granted a patent. You'll be getting a letter from our lawyers soon.
My main complaint with Netflix has been quality. I like that shows never seem to studder, but often times my eyes get tired of the blurry video. I hope they plan to add the option to cache more of the movie on this box because there is no way I'm gonna pay $100 for this thing if I'm stuck with blurry video, only now on a larger screen.
The price point is good but I see no compelling reason to buy it unless it offeres more features. They should've added some AppleTV like abilities. Otherwise I'll just plug my laptop into my TV like I do now. I don't need to spend $100 for that.
Really, it is in their best interests to get as many people on this as possible as it will lessen the load on their shipping centers. Right no it just doesn't offer very much. As nice as it sounds to be able to watch Saved By The Bell season 1 on my TV without hooking up my laptop, I'll have to pass for now. Maybe it'll be more exciting when Verizon finally extends FiOs to my area.
Actually a game for the Dreamcast called Space Channel 5 already gave DDR a plot. There are aliens that have taken over and you have to dance and shoot, following the moves shown to you in order to defeat them. The game was just weird enough to be a lot of fun. The concept is so far out there that you can't help but accept it completely. Plus, the visual design of the game is very cool in a retro 1960s view of space travel kinda way.
As a former union worker I can tell you that it was not that difficult to get a union job and pay the dues. Granted, I worked in a grocery workers union, so maybe manufacturing is different. I do know that entertainment is different (they have huge dues to pay). When I got my job (which payed way more than other comparable jobs) I had to pay like $30 a month to join the union. That got me an advocate if they tried to fire me and access to the free health care negotiated by the union. I also got considerably more money than people working at Walmart. But, I wasn't excluded, there were no hoops to jump through except signing that card.
:). Or at least this is my understanding of the situation. I think the idea is to keep it from being a purely business transaction, especially at the lower end, where people might be undercutting each other to get a chance. That could eventually ruin the entire pay structure.
I think part of the reason for the guild is that they don't want things to degenerate into a situation like the video game industry. With the guilds you have specific contractual obligations that are uniform. Yeah, Julia Roberts gets more, but the little guys still get an OK deal on paper (of course no movie ever makes a profit so nobody gets their royalties
Some mainstream films are quite good (Godfather 2 for instance). Still, even the crappiest movies are art in a way (if only in the Thomas Kindkade kinda way). My main point is that movies respect to a degree the people who make them happen. I don't see that happening as much with games (which has a lot to do with the relatively short time they've been around). I think that once the platforms stabilize a bit more (and the cost comes down) we'll start to see this happen.
Game companies are going to have to start treating their talent more like the creative individuals that they are and less like assembly line workers who are making toys. Look at all the crap EA puts their employees through. In the end nobody even knows anything about who made the game happen, it's just EA.
I agree about this GTA guy though, the deal is done and nobody should have to pay him more now. But I think he makes a valid point in general. He probably had to take the deal offered because that is how the industry is right now. You try to negotiate and say goodbye to your job. I think that needs to change, not just for voice actors (though if the pay was better maybe the voice actors in games wouldn't suck so much; then again, we'd also need to see better writers), but also for the programmers, writers and designers.
I think they'd like to be considered art, which is easier to defend against accusations of exploitation and harming the youngins. I think the game industry would do well to embrace the idea of video games as a creative pursuit. It would be easier to make indroads into the mainstream as well.
I've gotten the impression that some consider it an art, but perhaps that is just the audience wishing for it to be more accepted by the mainstream. Still, it would be easier to defend GTA for instance if you could convincingly make a comparison between it and a film like Scarface or a show like The Wire. If they start to take themselves seriously, as a creative product, then I think they'd have an easier time convincing people that things like GTA are not marketed at kids. Right now the majority of people see video games as toys.
Video games are starting to sell like movies. Just look at Final Fantasy. How many times is Square going to trot out the old games? Now, there weren't voice actors in those games, but it does show that older titles do have value. Lunar, originally for the SegaCD was later re-released on the Saturn, and later still on the PS1. That game had lots of voice acting. I wonder who got the money for those releases?
If the video game industry wants to be taken more seriously, they should start taking their product more seriously. That means respecting the talent that actually creates the games. Programmers shoulld get paid like writers. They need to have a guild. The head of the team should probably be considered the director or producer. As actors become more and more integral to the success of a game,they should be paid like any other actor. Games will never be "art" until the people who make them start considering them to be art.
How much of that software is open enough or written by benevolent enough people to be translated into all the languages that OLPC needs? Is "100 Shareware Memory improvement games funpack Volume II" available in Mandarin? Ethiopian?
Pretty soon, once you start paying all the fees, you're looking at a $900 laptop. There is Open Source software for windows, but a lot of that is stuff that comes from Linux.
Now, maybe with this XP deal Microsoft is willing to take on the translation task for more than just the core OS. That would be cool. I still think Sugar is useful as an educational tool.
Sugar has some issues, mostly with applications. Too many of them are half finished. Then again, what are they going to do on XP? Play Solitaire and write notes in Wordpad? Most of the issues you listed were not with Sugar itself, but with the applications. You're right that Terminal should be hidden (new versions of the OS allow deployments to choose their own bundles of activities). Yes, there should be more reference materials included. There is an app that is being worked on that bundles portions of Wikipedia for offline access. That sort of stuff needs to be localized though.
As far as the touchpad goes, it does need some work. There has been a lot of work on drivers lately (forcing re-calibration more often) that should clear up some of those problems. Again though, that isn't really Sugar's fault. That is a driver problem which is the fault of either the kernel or X11.
The issue with controls being on the edge of the screen is something I've noticed. You can turn off the automatic frame thingy though (and just use the frame button to activate it). This should be the default.
There are some good games available. Tetris and SimCity are both fun. One is even sorta educational.
Some of the icons are bad, same with Windows, same with MacOSX. Why for instance is the icon for Photoshop CS a quill on a blank white square? Or my new favorite is the icons for page down and page up in Publisher 2007's print preview. You can just barely tell that there are arrows on those icons, if you look really closely.
I think it has some potential; it's certainly not perfect yet. I like the journal (though I don't like how often entries get duplicated, and activities should ask you to name them when you hit the keep button to save). All in all though, it wasn't that hard to get used to, and after having installed some non-sugar apps on it, I can see why they shied away from the traditional GUIs. I would say that their fear of overlapping windows is a bit intense, especially in Browse where it actually renders many pages unusable if they require a usernam/password prompt in a dialog(perhaps having dialogs that work like ones in MacOS X, where they slide out of the titlebar would work).
Also, I believe Apple offered MacOS X for free but they were turned down.
Except in this case you are in a member's only mall. If you become a member fraudulently, then how is that different than trespassing? When you join a website you aren't just wandering into a public place. I think the fact that there is a form that you fill out to become a member makes it different. It's more like being a Costco member.
MySpace doesn't charge for their service. They setup a gate and make the reasonable request that you identify yourself. You lie about who you are and then enter. While you are there you do all sorts of stuff that is against the rules and harmfull to MySpace's business. That certainly sounds like trespassing to me. She entered the MySpace servers without permission, or at least gained permission fraudulently. She did it willfully. She did it intending to do harm.
I guess what makes this seem different to me is that she gained access through fraudulent means. If she had signed up for an account with her own information, then violated the terms of service, she should be asked to leave. However, she instead lied to gain access. I don't know exactly how the law works in this instance, but that feels like a sort of trespassing. Also, MySpace is not something that you are simply bringing into your home. Like Slashdot, when you post, you are sending it to somebody else's server. You in a sense "go out" to the server.
So, my agrument is that she trespassed, then harmed MySpace by abusing other members, thus harming MySpace's ability to utilize their property (nobody is going to advertise on MySpace if nobody wants to use it due to rampant abuse). So, I don't think the felony charge is a good thing (it does go way too far), but I see no reason that there shouldn't be a civil charge, with MySpace suing the lady. Access to MySpace is only granted through the terms of service. Any other access is trespassing.
It took a bit to get used to but I kinda like Sugar now. My only problem is the speed. That is at least partially because of all the security they put into it. Otherwise, Sugar is fine by me and works well with the small screen. I often run Opera and I really dislike using the menus and such in Opera. Too bad the native Browse app is crippled.
Still, I don't get all the Sugar hatred. I for one welcome our new sugary overlords.
I agree for the most part. My only problem is when people compare online services to the physical world. There is no "public" space online. MySpace is the property of News Corp. It isn't even government owned. When you're on MySpace, the rules should be different. Now, if you're on some web forum that intentionally has no rules, then things are different.
There should be limits on what can be inluded in a term of service, but they should be enforcable, just as private property laws are enforcable. I know that is going to be an unpopular statement here, but why should the Internet be different? Now, this law may be bad, but it doesn't mean that online services shouldn't be allowed to control what constitutes acceptible use of their service. When somebody violates those terms, to the detriment of the service, there should be consequences. Probably not criminal, but certainly civil.
I'm not sure I like this interpretation, but I do think that there should be a reasonable set of enforcable terms of service. I don't think it should be a criminal act though. My impression of what she did is this. She violated the very reasonable term of service requiring that she identify herself truthfully. She then used this fraudulently created account to harass a minor. Now, that in itself does not appear to be a crime. However,this act which was against the terms of service of MySpace touched a nerve (especially for MySpace who is always in news stories about online predators). So, by posting information about this minor with her fradulent account, she has tarnished the good (I know, that part is a stretch) name of MySpace. At the very least I think MySpace should be able to take her to court.
Now, for this to not be horrible, I think somebody needs to determine what is an acceptible term of service. As much as I enjoyed the free-wheeling days of the anonymous internet, I do think that companies providing services have a right to protect that service.
The fat end of a metal key works well for this, or at least it did on all the computers in my high school ten years ago. :)
These machines are neat, but holy shit they're expensive! Why is there such a leap in price when you go from a PDA that costs a few hundred bucks to one of these things that costs between $1000 and $2100 (when not on sale)? This is actually one of the most expensive portable Macs. I think I'd rather bolt a keyboard onto an iPod Touch.
So, how does one find out what type of panel their computer uses? I tried searching online but Dell doesn't seem to want to list the specs on my Vostro laptop. Does anybody know of a way to find this information out so that I can make a more informed decision next time I purchase a screen?